1.More than 1,000 contestants worldwide joined the URC Global Championship 2019 held in China.

2.The 2019th Championship’s theme is “Start Creating an AI World”, which mainly focuses on programs that promote AI mindset, innovative thinking, strategic teamwork and problem-solving capabilities of students.

3.As a global leading AI and robotic company, UBTECH is one of the first companies that are diving deep into AI education for Generation Z (the pre-teens and teens born roughly between 1996 and 2010),

The first-ever UBTECH Robotics Competition (URC) has attracted hundreds of thousands of contestants worldwide and only 1,100 of them have been able to secure themselves spots at the finals in Kunming, southwest of China.

After three days’ exciting, challenging and high-level AI robotic competitions between November 22 and 24 among contestants from China, South Korea, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Thailand, The Philippines and Malaysia, two Chinese teams and one team from South Korea have pocketed the top three prizes.

What’s so AI about URC?

This year’s URC has three AI-centered programs, which are AI Creative and Maker Challenge, Smart Factory and AI-BALL Captain. Students aged from 8 to 16 are required to use engineering and programming skills to design and program robots that should be able to deal with various challenges in limited time.

Taking Smart Factory as example, the robots should be designed to realize autonomous driving, object delivery as well as color recognition, simulating AI application in real-life smart factories.

New programs are set to be revealed in 2020 URC, which will be upgraded to real open-sourced AI application development and more advanced AI exploration using Yanshee humanoid robot.

“China Mode” of AI Education

Just as Zhong Yong, the Senior Vice President of UBTECH Robotics, put it: “As a significant part of UBTECH end-to-end AI robotic education solution, URC serves as a platform to test what the company’s AI education strategy has yielded.” Zhong noted that UBTECH aims to share the achievements with youth from all over the world and formulate a “China Mode” of AI education that can benefit them all.

What Zhong referred to is mostly the so-called Generation Z, who will become the major workforce behind the forthcoming digital and AI world.

To empower this generation, UBTECH has developed systematic solutions which focus on robotics and AI education running from preschool through to college. The company has also joined forces with renowned multinationals such as Apple, Disney and Tencent, as well as top universities including Carnegie Mellon University, University of Sydney, and East China Normal University to build an “AI+Robots” educational ecosystem.